AN AFFIRMATIVE FUTURE?
THE GLOBAL JUSTICE PROJECT’S ARGUMENT FOR SUFFICIENCY, FAST DECARBONIZATION, AND EQUALIZING GLOBAL INCOMES
When Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-focused science fiction book, The Ministry for the Future, was published in 2020 it suggested there could be a utopian pathway amidst multiple dystopian realities and that climate futures could be bleak but also potentially redeemable.
Nineteen years earlier, in 2001, Occupy Wall Street events contrasted the wealthiest 1% and the 99% of the rest of us as illustrative of glaring income inequalities. French economist Thomas Piketty followed in 2013 with his sweeping historical take on the role of capitalism in furthering income inequalities through his surprise bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century.
Since then, there has been much to despair about the direction of climate action and the continuing astronomic rise of global inequalities.
Climate denialism, for one, has made its comeback and has led to the push for a fossil fuel retrenchment. Heat waves, floods, and other climate impacts are intensifying each year. Record temperatures are recorded and then broken again the next year.
The picture is also bleak with respect to global inequalities. The 2007-2008 Great Recession, the 2020-2021 Covid epidemic, and now the AI boom of the 2020s have made these divides even wider. The rise of the Tech billionaires (and a trillionaire) and the restrictive policies and demonization of immigrants, often the most vulnerable of those with the lowest incomes, has further magnified global inequalities. Even China, while substantially reducing poverty levels, has experienced a widened gap between the wealthiest and the poorest.
Yet… The worst-case long-term climate scenarios may have shifted a bit downward, due in part to the rapid and largely unexpected increase in solar and wind and their dramatic fall in price compared to coal and other fossil fuels. And while global inequalities continue to increase, there has been a reconsideration and reckoning regarding affordability and income disparities that has brought new political energy to the tasks at hand.
Can there be an affirmative case that the future does not have to be as bleak as recent events have suggested while not trying to minimize their severity? A recent report by the Global Justice Project and the World Inequality Lab seeks to make that case. The report was pulled together by a team of 45 researchers, including Thomas Piketty, regarding what they characterized as “desirable future scenarios.”
Two key goals are highlighted: socioeconomic equality and planetary habitability. The goals are ambitious. The report describes how full economic equality between and within countries can be achieved, along with “fair access to education, healthcare and effective participation in all aspects of social economic, cultural and political life.” Income levels by 2100 would be compressed and would increase across all countries to a level equivalent to today’s richest countries. Per capita monthly gross national income would reach 5,000 Euros per month everywhere by the end of the 21st century, according to the GJP calculations.
With respect to climate, the goal is equally ambitious. The report argues that global temperature increase can be limited to 1.8c by the year 2100, through a “fast decarbonization” process. To achieve these climate and equality numbers, massive system changes would obviously be needed.
To make such changes, the GJP links the ideas of sufficiency and reducing inequalities both between countries and within countries at the center of climate projections and income and well-being analysis.
By arguing for sufficiency and situating it in the context of greater equality, the GJP counters notions of “abundance” and “green growth,” both proxies for a notion of a status quo+ green capitalism and a “slow decarbonization.” Goods to be produced, in a sufficiency scenario, would be needed “to sustain daily life, such as housing, food, community and individual health, childcare, eldercare, and clean water” and services, such as parks, libraries, utilities, the arts, education, internet, mail, and other information services [even AI] would be considered “essential public goods,” as I argued in my book, Care-Centered Politics.
These are changes, the GJP report asserts, that are difficult to sustain “without a compelling vision of why they are worthwhile.. and the sufficiency narrative aims to provide precisely such a vision.” Rather than framing fast decarbonization and global income equality as a sacrifice in the service of continued material accumulation, the GJP reframes it as an opportunity to build a more equitable and sustainable way of life. That could mean working fewer hours, reorienting consumption toward services, eating in a more sustainable and healthy manner, sharing prosperity globally, and living within a stable climate. The contrast is between “increased human well-being compared to the trajectory of endless work and material growth.”
Is the Sufficiency narrative and fast decarbonization and reducing and eliminating global inequalities truly feasible? Major economic and political disruptions like the current US/Israeli war with Iran suggest one such dramatic shift with respect to the rise of renewables. Although major disruptions could move in a negative direction as well, such as the disaster capitalism routes that Naomi Klein has shown.
The major contribution of the Global Justice Report and its Sufficiency, Fast Decarbonization, and Reducing Global Inequalities platform is less the route than the idea that change can happen and is plausible and that the numbers reinforce that plausibility. It’s more Gramsci than Lenin, a cultural shift and a discourse battle that needs to align with a political transformation.
That’s the hope. And to make hope possible is truly radical, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, rather than to allow making despair even more convincing.
LINKS
The Global Justice Project. World Inequality Lab. The Global Justice Report. 2026, https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/global-justice-report/
Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel. “We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way.” Guardian. June 10, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/10/economists-maths-growth-doomed-strategy-un-agencies-political-leaders